“Okay.” Not the answer I was expecting, but it worked.
Laylen returned seconds later with a very sleepy-eyed Aislin and Alex. Alex and Ailsin each grabbed a chair and dragged it to where my mother and I sat, and Laylen hopped up and took a seat on the railing.
Aislin was the first to speak, seeming kind of nervous. “Jocelyn, I can’t believe you’re here…It’s just so…” She looked like she was going to burst into tears
My mom, despite the fact she had been locked away in The Underworld, still possessed motherly instincts and reached over and placed a hand on Aislin’s hand. “It’s okay. I’m alright. Everything’s alright.”
I highly doubted that was true. In fact, I was fairly sure my mom was about to drop a not-all-right bomb on us here pretty soon.
Alex seemed less tolerant toward Aislin’s emotional behavior, and I even caught him rolling his eyes.
“So, Laylen said there was something you wanted to tell us?” he asked impatiently.
My mother nodded. “There is. But I need you to tell me what you know first. Gemma’s already told me what she knows, but I think you might know a little more.”
Shocker? I think not.
He pressed his lips together, his arms crossed over his chest as his eyes wandered around to all of us.
“Alex.” My mom’s voice was persuasive. “I understand your initial reaction is to keep things a secret—it’s what you’ve been taught to do. But it’s important that you tell me what you know, so we can stop the end of the world from happening.”
He still seemed hesitant. “Where do you want me to start?”
My mother considered this. “Why don’t you start from the beginning?”
“But, what is the beginning?” Alex asked, like he was asking a riddle.
My mother was patient, though. “Why don’t you start with the day that Gemma’s soul was detached. Do you remember what happened that day?”
He glanced at me, and I raised my eyebrows at him, implying to go ahead, because boy was I dying to hear this.
“The day Gemma’s soul was taken away…” He shut his eyes for a moment and then opened them back up. “She and I were hiding out in that little fort in the side of the hill, because earlier my father had told us Gemma had to go away.”
I touched the palm of my hand where the faintest of scars resided, remembering the vision I saw. How he had cut my hand and his, saying the words forem as he pressed them together. It was a word I still didn’t know the meaning of. One of these days, I think, I was going to have to invest in buying a Latin Translator Pocket Dictionary, if such a thing existed.
Alex must have noticed me touching my hand, because he clenched his own. “But he ended up finding us and took Gemma away. I never saw her again...Well, until my dad made me enroll in school to see if I could get to the bottom of why she started to feel.”
“And what happened between all those years when you didn’t see Gemma,” my mother asked, urging him for more details.
He was holding back—I could tell, but my mom asked him again, and he gave in. “Basically, my father trained me and Aislin to be Keepers, but he focused more on me because Aislin was busy getting taught how to use her witch power.”
My mom nodded. “And what happened while your father was training you to be a Keeper? Did he teach you to be emotionally closed off?”
“Emotionally closed off,” I gaped at my mother, wondering if she was losing it again. “No mom that was me.”
My mom kept her eyes on Alex, and he swallowed hard.
“Not so much emotionally detached,” he said, really struggling to keep his voice under control. “He would always tell me emotions are overrated, and that to be a good Keeper, I had to keep my emotions under control and only show them on the outside, but not feel them on the inside…something that’s not always possible for me to do….at least sometimes.” Alex looked more confused than I had ever seen him look, as if he was trying to figure something out, but just couldn’t get there. Then, he glared at my mother. “I really don’t get what any of this has to do with the star’s power and the end of the world.”
“It has everything to do with it,” my mother told him and rolled up the sleeves of the ratty old shirt